* * * * *
A searing tide of napalm coursed through the mineshaft, obliterating every creature slinking in the dark. The alpha saw its flesh melting, falling slack off tissue and bone, dripping into the hard base of the mine as everything went white. The heat sucked the air in ahead of those gathered outside, the rain briefly bending into the dim fissure. The revins looking into the mine from the bench road felt the draft pulling them inwards. It was quiet for a moment, and then the cries of the incinerated sailed outward. Unhinged echoes of the dead. The blaze ripped out of the mineshaft and washed over those outside, whipping into the caldera like a solar flare. Tissue and blood spit from the cleft, cast into the pit with fire and rain. The sentinel lost sentience. A torpor washed over everything.
Solar power cell – 0%. Solar armor – breached
Drivetrain – non-operational
Visual/cortico/thermal/radar optics – unresponsive
HD/Comms – compromised; non-operational
Water – 0%. Napalm – 0%
Railgun – 0% capacity
JE – (scrambled)
Forced shutdown; entering hibernation
12. Farewell, Sonora
Becca and the others slunk into their seats, pinned back by the velocity of the rocket lifting into the troposphere. The main engine roared with 500,000 pounds of thrust. T+10. Becca’s eyesight began to constrict into a tunnel vision. The ship oscillated violently. She looked around and saw the other passengers – children - close their eyes. A small digital display on the ceiling showed a human diagram beeping, depicting passengers going to sleep. Becca turned her head and felt the arc of the rocket begin to twist, its trajectory tilting. She pressed her head to the side, straining with all her might, to peer outside of the small oval window. She looked down and saw the contrails of the rocket falling backwards and there, close enough to touch, was the wisp of storms rolling over Sonora. The first stage booster decoupled, tumbling into the blue like a barrel into Niagara. Sheet lighting cracked through the dark maelstrom they had just passed through. T+30. They were above it all. Becca wondered what was happening and if she was ascending into heaven. The expanse of the Earth’s lithosphere stretched out like a dream, encircled by green aurorae flaring in soft tufts like apparitions wandering through the sea. A solar wind, wailing in the void of the magnetic field. The rocket passed through a noctilucent cloud on the edge of times cessation. They entered the thermosphere and the massive vehicle gradually softened, the violent rattle subsiding to a hum. Becca felt her eyes grow heavy. Her heartbeat slowed down. A nozzle near the display whistled, discharging a vapor into the thin air of the cramped module. The cylinder emanated the acrid smell of anthracite and the human diagram blinked red with worry. Becca felt herself blacking out. As her eyes closed, she heard the promise, again:
“You are a survivor.”
* * * * *
EPILOGUE
End and beginning and end. The world without man went on. One epoch passed and another emerged from the cold depths. The cracked glaciers reformed, pulling salt water into crevasses and seracs, freezing into silver tusks that pierced the low clouds of the Arctic Circle. Ice flow pushed into the polar plains, drumlins disappearing into the abyssal sediment. And so with it, the anthropogenic mass extinction was halted. The anthropocence was over. The fallow lands of slash-and-burn were reborn. Forests thrived and saw blades rusted. Cities eroded into the firmament and asphalt roads dissipated like veins wilting with age.
The summers grew short in Sonora, deluged in rainfall and sparked by intermittent sun. The winters crept down from the Catalinas, lingering for most of the year and blanketing the lowlands in snow. The saguaros and palo verdes disappeared, giving way to ponderosa and fir. The desert plains vanished. Dust turned to sorrel leaves and conical detritus. A thick canopy enveloped the ruins of Old Main, Hotel Congress, and the broken dome of Bio3. Bison thundered south across the Baja Peninsula. Condors made their homes in the shattered penthouses of abandoned skyscrapers. And machete fish glimmered along rushing tributaries that sprang from dry washes along the alluvial fan. A new wilderness flourished amidst the cemetery of post-history.
But while one mass extinction was averted, another still loomed. Revins spread across the warmer climates. Those that had huddled in the caves and ruins of the north fled south, congregating in great masses along the Sonoran badlands. While they still couldn’t wield tools, nor could they stitch clothing, they grew in girth, adding heavy layers of fat and skin that kept them warm in the changing seasons. While they didn’t hunt larger animals – elk, bear, ram – they were vicious in their predation of smaller creatures that they would trap in crude ways. Gophers, rabbits, and, in the vast sewers of remnant cities, rats. Populations would swell when food was discovered, and dwindle when depleted. The chain was disrupted. Smaller species were disappearing. The larger mammals had to migrate to survive, or prey on the revins. And they did both. Revins were killed in sporadic numbers by mountain lions, which grew more vicious with each kill. They had to adapt to survive. They would hunt in packs, move in packs, and reproduce in packs. The inbreeding compounded their feral behavior. Their cognitive ability remained unevolved. Their prefrontal cortex was irrevocably destroyed. But their bodies conformed to the environment encroaching upon them. Deep claws, sharp incisors, concave skulls, sloping spines, and calcified kneecaps that protruded from their skin. They moved quickly but stayed close to the ground, sliding along their knees when frightened by some sudden sound. Their nasal cavity elongated, better suited to sniff out predator and prey. Their eyes widened, limbs shortened, body hair thickened. They were almost unrecognizable from their ancient kin. They were distorted relics of bygone times. Wallowing wights of the foreverwinter.
In the frozen melancholy of the hunger moon, a low thundering would roll through the perihelion sky, rattling the tall pines and shaking snow from needles. Just as soon as the storm arrived, it would vanish in the dark. This went on through countless nights. As a sudden burst reverberated in the dusk, the living skittered along the icy soil, ducking under the brush as the echo of abnegation cracked through flurries gusting in the ether. Something was changing in the air, and the revins sensed it. They were nervous.
For weeks, the storm would appear in the evening, materializing from the smallest tufts of vapor in the night sky and blooming into a massive, black anticyclone. The air was consumed by the fury, lights streaking through the opaque veil from a fulmination rocketing through the shelf of the tempest, blankets of snow wafting down in violent winds. The revins huddled in their holes, sheltered in caves, and crammed into ruins, waiting out the wrath of the lost torrent.
Finally, one warm evening, as the revins began to brace themselves for the return of storm, they were surprised to see something else in the sky - the bright, full, lenten moon. It shone down on them like a lantern, illuminating the white sheet of frost and snow in the open ground. They came out of their hovels and gawked at the magnificent glow, basking in the calm which had returned to the high desert at last. They breathed in and smiled wide, rotten teeth and dry sockets gleaming in the warm light.
The next morning, as wisps of snow blew off the high canopies, as the twisted, gnarled bodies of the revins awoke from their slumber, a strange light appeared in the clear blue sky. A white contrail, splitting the empyrean. The feral minds were puzzled by this faint vapor high in the heavens. As the line stretched downwards, arcing into the distance, it picked up speed. The streak in the sky stretched out a great distance and, as the fore descended through a smattering of high clouds, it smoldered red like a flare falling through water. A laceration ripping downwards from heaven.
As the fireball careened towards the earth, it began to arc parallel to the horizon, leveling off and searing across the Sonoran dreamland. Other revins, huddling in their burrows or standing amidst the frost, looked up and were rapt with the ember burning across the sky. The oval-like cinder suddenly broke in two, each fiery piece of debris spinning wildly in
different directions, and from the burning shell emerged a gray and white object that continued overhead in a straight vector.
The revins traced this thing as it raced across the sky. It looked to them like some sort of massive, pale vulture - but its wings didn’t beat. As it descended above the Coronado Forest, it came into view. It was a craft. The revin mind alighted with some recognition of its outline. They recalled the rusting hulks of A-10s that lay in heaps at AMARG, the Davis-Monthan plane graveyard nearby. The craft’s underside was gray but its topside was white. Four exterior engines – two aft and two forward, encased in cylinders like the old Fairchild-Republic Thunderbolt – carried the craft through the cold air above Apache Peak. From there, it began to circle and further descend. Strange black markings were painted on the stabilizers and, as it banked, the revins could see some sort of red, circular symbol on each wing. Dark smears streaked out of imperfect panel lines. As it nosed down, they could see the front of the craft had a protrusion, like a cockpit but opaque with a steely luster.
After circling in the midday sun for some time, it slowed, all four engines craning upwards. As it continued its descent, coming fully into view with the handful of revins just underneath, still no sound could be heard from the craft. It skimmed over the ponderosa canopy, heading east, until it came upon a clearing. Ahead was the flat, cracked foundation of a building that had disappeared in the harsh elements, the withered blacktop of a parking lot that had faded into the dirt, and a sign that was black with the soot of brush fire and years of soil blowing across the desert. As the craft hovered forward, it stopped just ahead of the weathered sign, which could just be made out:
Kartchner Caverns State Park
An open chasm in the ground loomed in the distance, facing the nose of the craft as it quietly floated above the ground lightly dusted with snow. At first, the shuttle was alone in its vigil over the abandoned park. As the night crept forward, and the clear sky was bedecked with stars, a melancholy wail began to pierce the air, emanating from someplace within the mysterious contraption. Not unlike a whale song. A siren in Sonora. This echolocation blared out loudly across the expanse. For the first hour, it repeated a simple aria that rose and fell in a few notes. Like a car alarm slowed down and lowered in pitch, echoing across the hillsides. As the night grew dark, the frequency shifted. The song changed, but went on in perpetuity through the darkness. As this lamentation filled the woods, revins began to approach. Cautiously at first, but full of curiosity. They looked on at the strange trespasser floating before them, glimmering ashen in the moonlight.
Over the next several days, more revins came to gaze at this thing that had broken into their lives. Soon, there were hundreds of Sonoran revins gathered in the ruins of the park. They made makeshift hovels in the ground. They lined up against the crumbling walls of the amphitheater. They huddled together under piles of pine needles. They sank their jaws into cottontail ripped from nearby warrens. But no living soul approached the chasm. They woke up at dawn and cocked their heads, listening to this magnificent sound pouring out of the machine.
Among them emerged one that drew the craft in the ground with its bony digits. All gray hair and sagging skin. This proselytizer chided anyone who got too close, revering the arrival with wonder. The gathering turned into a cult. They looked to it for something. With each change of its song, they grew animated, expecting something to happen that so far did not come to pass. They drew in closer as the frequency halted then sighed, drooling, as the wail resumed and shifted slightly. A low, looping gospel. The naked, hairy revins shivered in the frost, beating their hands in the wet soil, pulling up clumps and shaking their fists at the metal craft. But they dared not smear it with their curses nor their handfuls of shit and sod.
Westerly winds blew into the cold mornings but hushed in the overhead sun. Days and nights passed by without the revins noticing. The snow melted into the shale and limestone, unveiling the red basin and range. The white-capped spire of the Whetstone Mountains hung over them, cropping the sunset in the west. A cold creek rushed past in the north, spilling off Apache Peak and colliding with the tributaries of the massive San Pedro River in the east. Ages before, Wyatt Earp shot and killed Curly Bill Brocius in this pass, ending a blood vendetta against the cowboys responsible for his brother’s death. Revins walked over the sunken bones and spent shells, unaware of the ancient vengeance that had unfolded before them.
One evening, the craft’s song ended and the whisper of the still night breathed through the thistle and sedge. Those gathered nearby hushed, their attention turned to the gray and white shuttle hovering silently in their midst. Their heavy eyelids drew back, pupils wide in the dark. They inched closer, jostling with each other to peer at what might transpire next. Hands shaking, steam rising from sweaty brows in the algid gloom. High clouds moved under the moon and the black veil lowered on the spectral wild. Everything was black. Everything was quiet save for the breeze in the reeds and the clattering of teeth. Naked feet teetering on sharp rock.
A series of small, circular portals – like small glass plates – emerged from retracting panels all along the shuttle’s fuselage. Sparks of light appeared behind each glass circle – little lanterns dotting the darkness. The revins moved closer, gasps of glee piercing the air. The lights got brighter and brighter. The brush and fir were illuminated on the periphery of the open range. The faraway oak and pine on Apache Peak lit like faint stars dotting the universe. The bare skin of the gathered crowd radiated, gleaming pale like the frost they stood upon. They squinted in the glowing flood, holding their hands up to shield the light. And with that, a blinding torrent filled the eyes of every being standing near. Even with their eyelids closed, they were consumed with the lambent. Their pupils burned.
Chaos broke out. A painful shout erupted amongst the crowd, now stumbling forward in their blind daze. A faint whirr could be heard, cycling up like a fan gaining speed. And then a staccato of gusts – like arrows splitting paper. The light shifted in circles. The revins panicked, shrieking out hollow pleas – the cries cut short in a garbled pop and hiss. The proselytizer stumbled forward and caught a shadow in his field of view, briefly glimpsing the shuttle from between the eclipse. In those few seconds, the elder could just make out a turret, under the nose, firing a rapid salvo of light into the confused crowd. The craft rotated as the battery ripped through revin flesh, perforating limbs and incinerating patches of tissue. A strobe of white fire. Bodies were split open and whole swaths of skin turned to ash, guts cauterized, leaving them disfigured and writhing. The elderly herald crawled on his hands and knees until he came face to face with the opaque cockpit of the shuttle. The ashes of revin bodies swirled in the air, a discord of dying cries piercing the night. The old man threw his hands up in the air and was consumed. Gone.
The floodlights on the shuttle faded and the pyre glittered with the embers of bodies riddled through with gunfire. The shuttle stopped its gentle rotation, coming to rest facing the Kartchner cleft, the turret pointing straight towards the cavern opening. A hatch opened from the underside of the cockpit, extending downwards as a ramp, steps protruding pneumatically from the interior. A light emerged from inside the craft, illuminating the desert floor beneath the plank.
From there, stepping into the soil, a figure emerged from the craft and into the high desert air. It was encased in a synthetic poly-fiber exosuit. A traveller. It sunk its heel into the dirt, twisting its foot back and forth in the ground like it was unsure of something. Unsteady in the world. Wrapped from head to toe in a lithe, airtight shell. White chassis, like the shuttle it emerged from. Head enveloped in a helmet with the same steely luster of the cockpit it was walking under. A case was wrapped around its back, contoured and sleek. The traveller reached up to the gun turret beneath the nose, a foot or so above its grasp, and the armament unlocked, the gun case sliding downwards from the pneumatic retractor. The traveller caught the handle of the cylinder rifle as it dropped into its hand.
A
flutter of dead leaves swirled past, pooling above the shuttle and carrying on into the darkness. The wild hummed with fascination. Creaking bones. Mule deer gathered on the western ridge. From the chasm ahead, a colony of ghost bats escaped the black and ascended into the night, their eyes gleaming back in the dying embers of the massacre. All heartbeats, drumming in unison with the faraway tides. Love was gone. The traveller swung its ashen cylinder rifle in the direction of the cave, moving forward cautiously. Light footsteps crunching in the frost-packed soil. Small steam bursts shot into the air from a sub-vent at its nape. The same red circle on the shuttle’s wing was emblazoned on the traveller’s breast. A light flickered at the rifle’s muzzle, illuminating the chaparral and the winding path leading to the cavern.
The traveller stepped into Kartchner Cavern, sidestepping down a broken walkway and into the cold, damp rock of the upper cleft. Its rifle light darted around as the traveller shuffled past a cairn near the entrance. Shadows dancing on the walls in the wild, flickering in the artificial light. The furtive figure continued on for some time with its beam of illumination vectoring from left to right in the narrow corridor. The glow would sporadically catch the white poly-fiber shell as the traveller passed through the underworld, casting itself in a haunted spark. The echoes of its footsteps bounded into the ether and the air ascended. The traveller shone its light forward and the massive cavern came into view.
Archon of the Covenant Page 17
